Building Forward Momentum as a Developer Entrepreneur

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we are not just Building Better Developers and the Developer Nord podcast, which we always are. We are talking about forward momentum. We're talking about getting unstuck. We're talking about how do you, potentially, as this is the start of the year, how do you actually kickstart your year? My name is Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of Developer Nord and also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you assess where you're at and build a roadmap for success. Set technology checkup that everybody needs periodically. Good thing and bad thing. Wow, I've had quite an interesting one this weekend. The good thing is I'm not sitting in middle Tennessee where there's ice and all kinds of nasty stuff that's going on there and people losing electricity. However, I am sitting in Portugal where there are winds and big larks of water and trees down and also the train system down. So a nice weekend that we were going to have that was going to be on the trains and a very comfortable ride has turned out to be planes, trains and automobiles where we took a bus and then took a train and then didn't like the bus coming back because we're going to make it. We're going to spend an extra night. We're going to fly. It's a pain. But the good thing is it could be worse. The bad thing is it could be better. But what is never better is having my co-host, Michael, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Melash. I'm one of the co-founders of Developer Nord. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we create reliable tailored software that helps you work smarter, scale faster and stay in control. Good things, bad things. Well, said Storm Rob's mentioning, I live in Tennessee and thankfully we had power. Unfortunately, we have been iced in for a total of about 10 days. I have not been able to leave the driveway, the house and the animals have been screwing across the ice in the yard for quite some time. Hopefully today the good news is looks like we're finally going to be above freezing this week and hopefully all this ice will go away. I guess the other bad thing is we're supposed to get rain behind us. So if the rain comes before this ice melts, we're going to have some nice little mudslides, water slides and flooding going on for another few days. But yeah, that's it for me. Nothing is as fun like weather just in general. But somebody that does say fun, at least we're going to find out, is Andrew. If you want to go ahead, he's our guest today. Would you like to go ahead and introduce yourself? Sure, sure. My name is Andrew. My background is software engineering and I've built and sold a number of businesses over the years. I've done that as a solo entrepreneur and also as a co-founder. And I've got a long story going back to the 90s. So I've got plenty to talk about. But weather wise, I normally live upstate New York. So I'm just near Cooperstown normally. And that is a place that is not afraid of snow and ice for sure. But like Rob, I'm currently in Europe. So I've been able to avoid that. I've got a lovely dusting of an inch or two of snow. And it's been very pleasant. No black ice, nothing. So it's been good for me. Yeah, so my background, look, I've come out of software engineering. I started my life in university, academia, working at universities. I progressed through building some businesses. And nowadays, you know, I'm CTO for a gaming company. I'm on board of an investment roll up in Europe. So, you know, we've raised some funding and we're currently trying to grow that and identify great businesses that we can roll up and do something great together. And I'm CTO of a software development company as well. So I had a bit of fractional CTO staff. And this month, one of my fractional jobs wound down a little bit. So, you know, I've kicked off yet another little company for myself because there's never enough, never enough time. I wish I could do more, which could learn everything. But I just have to choose. And sometimes I make good choices. Sometimes I make bad choices. And no matter what happens, I enjoy every choice I make. So it's good. So for those of you that are wondering, yes, Andrew is like what every developer nor listener wants to be when they grow up. I think that's what all of us are, is we love to do it, like just love building stuff, love doing things. I think all of us like the idea of both being the solopreneur, but also the, you know, the entrepreneur side of it, but not just doing it ourselves, but actually building a business and having something that goes on that lives beyond us. So expecting a really fun conversation here. Let's start with the let's go back a little bit into the early years. Let's just talk about like your first solo business and how you stepped into it, because I'm wondering particularly if you just sort of like dove into it, was this one of these that you side hustles your way and it eventually said, and eventually said, I have to do it. Or how was that? Let's start with that story. Your origin story, as it were. Origin was actually more of a collaboration. So that actually gave me the confidence by working with some great people that gave me confidence to step out and eventually try things by myself. So for me, my very first one, you know, I was working at a university running software, you know, I used to do things that back then I called math, but nowadays everyone calls AI. You know, I was predicting koala populations in sheep grazing fields. And I was predicting tree girth based upon environmental factors and things like that. But nowadays, you know, an LLM can probably do it. Try and do it, but we'll probably get it wrong. But, you know, that's kind of stuff I was doing. And I kind of identified this guy called Tim Berners-Lee popped up and said, yeah, hey, use this web stuff. This looks really cool. And I thought, wow, awesome. So, you know, I was sitting around with my team leader at a company that I was working with and he was working on an invoicing system for a muffler shop. So he was just doing the billing, really, really boring point of sale stuff. Apologies for any muffler sales guys out there, but boring point of sale stuff. And, you know, we decided that this dial up internet thing looked pretty cool. And like, how do we do that? I wanted to learn Linux. I want to learn web stuff. And I saw this as becoming a really big thing. Anyway, so I got to go with two mates, my team lead, my engineering team lead at the time, who eventually became my best man at my wedding and also the guy that owned the muffler shop. And we put together an ISP, a dial up ISP. We had stallion boards. We had at one stage, we gave away a no engaged signal guarantee to our subscribers because we had more modems and people dialing in. So that was an easy thing for us to easily give away. It was a terrible story from so long ago, but it was something that really taught me a lot. You know, I learned the power of working with people that had great skills. So I was able to identify that, you know, the guy that owned the muffler shop, he was commercially really viable. He knew his stuff. He knew how to commercialize stuff. He knew how to sell stuff. Me, I was a great software engineer. I knew how to write code. And my team lead, he was an infrastructure guy. So he taught me a lot about modems and things like that. So we kind of formed together a little jigsaw puzzle that I guess that fit really well from our skill set. And that really gave me the confidence to step beyond that and into bigger and better things. So, you know, I was lucky to have good friends and step up based upon that. The solo stuff, I might talk about my latest thing I'm doing. For me, again, January this year, two days ago, no, January started, I guess, but that's very January ended. You know, I've gotten into cyber security. As security has always been a thing. So at the moment, I'm really, really focused on how to simplify cyber security for small and medium enterprises. And I'm not talking about how to make your laptop secure. I'm talking about inbound security researcher queries. So people, when they report an issue with your product or something, I'm looking at workflows through that, how to identify it, how to actually vet them, how to respond to a policy for, you know, bug bounty programs, how to make that simpler for people. So, you know, there are platforms out there like HackerOne and that that do these sorts of things, but mine is a little bit differently focused. It's a little bit more software, more entrepreneur friendly, I guess, more small and medium enterprise. So it's certainly very interesting from that perspective. I just realized my alerts just came through. So hopefully that didn't pop up on over the sound. But no. Oh, good. OK. I've just turned off the software in the background. So I get no more. All right. So that's probably where it is. Like, would I do what I did today? And what have I learned over the time? One, I've identified from myself that being a solo developer is great. You know, it gives me a lot of time to focus on my code and getting things right. But the more I focus on my code, the less I can focus on maybe sales or maybe marketing or or how to connect my audience. So those are all sorts of things that I've tried to work out of time. It's been great with the hat of all different sorts of trades and things like that. So it's from that experience, sorry, again, of. I'm getting notifications, so apologies. I should have shut this all down prior. I'm. Just trying to do not disturb mode. There we go. Apologies, apologies. That's OK. Rob had instances of that in the past as well. Yeah, it's just so annoying. Hopefully you can just come up with apologies. All right. Let it that out. Yeah. So there you go. All right. So, you know, what I've learned over time being a solo guy, wearing all the different hats, say marketing and things like that, it's it's difficult. And quite a balance to, you know, not only identify what you want to do, but go out there and hunt it, drag, kill it, drag it back, carve it up and eat it. And and why too busy eating it? You know, you're losing the business that's getting away. So that's always something that I found quite tricky. I think in the time of AI now, you know, LLMs are great for me to plan my solo marketing campaigns. I get them easily to help me write up my social media posts for the week or things like that, or at least give me not write them, but at least give me a plan. So, you know, I often come up with what I want to do. I'll use one element to help me plan what I want to do. And I use another LLM. They'll compare my plan versus the plan that it generated and market like a teacher. So, you know, I'll use two tools to help me deliver quicker, deliver better. I also find that looking at various LLMs also helps with my code quality. Like I don't write production code with AI, but I'll certainly get it to do a static analysis of my code. I'll certainly get it to look at my plan of code. Like what have I missed? I'll get it to make me write better test cases, things like that. So very, very interesting from that perspective. Debugging is great. Cutting and pasting in an error message is fantastic to help me research. You know, I do treat a lot of AI as a shortcut of Google. You know, go on other days, stick it in, go 25 pages of Google deep to find the specific stack overflow issue. But you know, you can get something maybe close sooner. So from that productivity perspective, I still use AI for a lot of tools. AI of course is a market or channel to market as well. And we can talk about that perhaps. But yeah, I guess that's where I started. I started as something I identified with friends. We became better from there. I moved on to other things where I for another time I was sitting with guys at a pub and we saw what was going on. We thought we could do something better. And we wrote that again. And that's one of my most successful projects. And they weren't friends, but they became friends after many, many years and many, many scars and battles we had together to get things going all the way through to solo stuff. And for others as well, I ended up marrying my best partner. So my wife and I have been working on businesses now for almost 20 years. So it's been a very, very good, good experience as well to be able to bring that in house and not be so lonely, I guess, because that's often something that we don't necessarily talk about as entrepreneurs enough. It's difficult that your work drags you away from your family. But it's great to have a life partner there as well. Wow, there's a lot there. I guess to start with, I think you mentioned the I guess to start with, it is it is amusing to me because I've sort of it's been a while. You know, it's been 30, almost 40 years now since the dial up days, early dial up days. And it's it's amazing to me how many people I talk to that are in consulting and software companies that they can trace it back to. Well, initially, we did some ISP work, you know, back in the 90s. That is what everybody did. It was just it seemed like it was the easy thing to do. It was sort of like the obvious choice to just everybody needed it. Everybody needed a local one. They didn't want to use, you know, a copy server, America Online or one of those kinds of things. And the little ones, the little local ones, you know, tended to be a lot better. And so it's amazing how many people start with that. And then somewhere along the way, they found a product or they had a customer. And then the next thing they know, they're building, you know, like you said, they the web was starting to become a thing. And so now they're starting to build websites and it just grew from there. So that is that is that is in the background of so many stories that I've heard. It's really interesting. Before I go on, I do want to mention, like, I've never really talked about that either, but I think if you there are there are downsides to working with family, whether it's, you know, your your kids or your spouse or something like your cousins or anything like that. But I think there's also a lot of benefits to that as well. And I would say particularly spouse, my wife has worked with me as well. And it's it makes the the conversations much more interesting because now you actually have somebody that you can talk to, especially if you're like, I'm sure you're like us, where you end up you're thinking about your job and business all the time. It's just always like an ideal come up. You'll be out, you know, sitting on the lake fishing and someone like, hey, I've got this idea. And it's really great to be able to like just bounce that off of somebody and have that sounding board and and not just have that conversation run in your head before. Like, I guess one thing before and this may take us off in another past anyway, is to say, how do you you mentioned you laid out a lot of areas that you use AI. I refer to it as using it sort of like a virtual assistant because it's just like you can do all these little things. I love passing it back and forth between LLMs and just sort of say, what do you think? What do you think? Especially when I'll say, like, write this so it doesn't sound like AI wrote it. And then I'll pass it back and forth a couple of times. It's like clean some stuff up and then get it to a point where it's like, oh, OK, yeah, now this this makes sense. And gosh, debugging, if you're not using anybody out there, if you're not using AI for debugging, that is, I think, the quickest, easiest way to get a big return on investment, particularly like particularly I found configuration type issues and typo kinds of issues that end up in code. You can throw something there and very quickly have it tell you, like, this is exactly where it is or, oh, you forgot this. The stuff that you need, that second set of eyes. It is a great second set of eyes in that case. But now have you but with that, have you felt like it has has freed you maybe to like to pursue more of those ideas? You said, you know, you started out with said there's not enough hours in a day. Do you feel like this is something that sort of has given you a little bit of that freedom to be like, oh, now I can actually pursue a couple more of these things and product ideas that I had. Absolutely. There's a few things in there. One, I'll use AI to help me scaffold an idea quickly. So I'll do a proof of concept or something and I'll get it to show me. I'll get it to help me show a core bit of functionality or a new idea so I can demo it quickly. Again, I don't use any of this code in production ever. It's my suggestion never to do that. I'll also even use AI and ask it to take on personas. So I'll try and identify who my users are and I'll get the AI to to be that user and give me feedback as that user. You know, if I'm writing an architecture document for a customer, I'll you know, I'll brief it that it's, you know, a certified cloud architect or something to say, hey, you know, find the thoughts with this and things like that. So I'll I'll work with that. Does it allow me to deliver faster? It allows me to do rapid prototyping exceptionally fast. It allows me to demonstrate value or ideas really, really quickly. So yeah, I one thing I don't like about LLMs is it's too supportive. You know, things like chat, you're famous for always saying, yes, what a wonderful idea. And, you know, we all know that's crap for the language. You know, I've had over my time, I've had failures of people. I've had failures of processes. I've had, you know, one of my first real businesses, I had one of my accountants make a mistake in my early year. That cost me a lot with the tax authorities. So, you know, there's things you've got to keep your eyes on over the years and things you've got to fix and you can't drop the ball on those things. And, you know, I'd love to see a lot more use of an assistant, and I like to call them tooling. For me, I see AI as either a tool. So helping me become faster and better at what I do or as a channel. So that's trying to identify, you know, if I'm a e-commerce person rather than SEO, I should be thinking about AI optimization, where when you ask about a product or a service in chat GBT, you know, my product or service pops up as a recommendation rather than, you know, maybe my competitors. So making sure that my products and services are discoverable, indexed and referenced by AI as well is essential. So to me, that's a channel. So, you know, people go and ask, you know, what's the best product for X purpose and my product service pops up when it comes in from them. Obviously, that requires seeding of Reddit and all those sorts of other techniques that are a bit shady, perhaps. But, you know, if you build a community as well, that will certainly help in that space. So I'd like to do in there. So, yeah, I tooling, I optimization of the workflow is critical and something I use a lot. Yeah, it's it was actually a conversation I had actually with my wife the other day, we were talking about that as we were talking about AI. We were like, how infamously positive it is about like, it's a great idea. And we we chastised it on a regular basis and said, no, don't tell us this. Don't tell it like, you know, give us the give us the poke the holes in the theories. And we were actually postulating. And this is something for everybody to try out this next time you're on an LL. You know, any of them is say, you know, hey, always take the negative approach or something like that. It's like turn it into something that's always trying to pick apart your ideas. And it might turn it into some sort of sociopath, but it also may get you some really good, like really do a good job of picking holes in your ideas. And absolutely. I'm also leaning towards a lot of open source that I run locally as well. Self-hosted. You know, there's call but I was recently released in the last few days. And, you know, people were downloading the wrong or counterfeit versions of call, but people were installing plugins that were were. Not safe or secure, so I tend to avoid the consumer models. I use the enterprise model. So the the top end paid for public models or I'll use my own open source ones that I run locally. So it's a little bit more safe and secure for me. Interesting. Yeah, I've used AI quite a bit for testing software and things of that nature. And and you can actually work on your chat about a little bit the prompts and that to get it to be a little less positive, a little more critical. But it I think it's the nature of the beast. They're trying not to make people think that AI is coming after them like the Terminator, but it it's almost like that feel like they're trying to make it comfortable for everyone to use versus make it more realistic, more like a person, because then people will start to maybe judge it or be a little more afraid of it. I want to circle back around for a minute, though. Come back to your beginning conversation about all the ventures you're kind of involved in and all the things you do. How do you keep it straight? Because I know I run into the same problem where you get stuck working in your business. You're not working enough on your business with marketing and things of that nature. It sounds like you have so many different things going on. How do you stay focused to make sure that your companies are moving forward, that things are getting done and that you're you don't get stuck going on too many rabbit holes. And the next thing you know, nothing gets done. Yeah, that's often something I've I've fallen victim to myself. Like at the moment, I've I've written a book that's currently with editors. I've got one hundred and forty nine edits. I've got to change. They gave that to me in November. It's now February and I haven't touched it. So, you know, I've got to work on some things better. For me, it's all about time management. You know, my sleep patterns are terrible. You know, I'm certainly not getting enough sleep. This is actually a face for a 20 year old, not a person. Not much more mature. So, you know, I'm not sleep. I exist on a lot less sleep because I can't because there's always something to do. For me, it's curiosity. You know, I look for myself and even with people I work for, you know, I look like curiosity, I like collaboration, I like autonomy as well. So, you know, I'll discover something because I'm interested in it. At the moment, I've been looking at mesh test, and a few other alternative communications methods. And I go out and research that I can even ask my LLM again. I hate to bang on about AI, but, you know, it will give me a market overview fairly quickly so I can get up to speed on a concept really quickly. And then if it's something of interest, I'll delve deeper on my own. I miss my research librarians back in my university days. So that aside, how do I keep things going? Well, I've got to eat first. So I always prioritize my customers that expect, you know, certain hours and contact times, you know, they're always remain under the top priority. So, you know, they are contracted hours or whatever, and that's what they get. But as I said, it's fractional. So, you know, I'm not full time with them at all. So, you know, I'll do the exact hours that they want. I always do extra as well, because, you know, they expect it, I expect it. And it's the nature of doing a good job. But I tend to manage myself in sprints, I guess. So, you know, I'll have a clear picture of what I want to achieve. And I want to have a date for that. So I'll say I need to do that in January or I need to do that this week. So I tend to talk in in round numbers of today, this week, this month for my timing. And I'll say, OK, this month, I want to release this feature on that product or, you know, I want to finally do those edits on that book and things like that. So I'll have a goal for the month and I'll break that down as I go. And I prioritize based upon that. So I do run myself on sprints and I do have a plan for 2026 that I know I want to achieve these certain things. But I never pack that full. You know, one of the things I learned managing large teams and software organizations, a lot of project managers, even a lot of engineering managers, look at the staff and time that at 100 percent availability. We all know that's not true. You know, you've got sick leave, annual leave, you've got meetings, all those sorts of things. So I'll cut it down to 80 percent or 60 percent based upon the culture of the company. And even my own time, I'll cut down and then I'll try and leave that innovation time as well. I remember once upon a time, Google used to have their 20 percent time. I don't think it exists anymore, but maybe it does. Somebody from Google, correct me. But, you know, there's that innovation time you need to be able to sit back and look at the industry. And quite frankly, one thing I've tried never to lose between my C-level roles and my board roles down to and today I still write code is that if I don't put aside time to write code, to engage with engineers, to read that technical white paper, to to see the latest release from Amazon or Google, I'm going to be out of touch so quickly. So I try and make sure that I have personal development time because me being a good professional requires my constant personal development. And that also helps my customers, it helps my products, and it helps me and my own curiosity to engineer things better. So I guess that's a long winded answer. I'm full of long winded answers today. But, you know, I do break it down to sprints and I do categorize everything. So what am I going to achieve today? What am I going to achieve this week? What am I going to achieve this month? Definitely my my my big things. And then I've got future things, you know, what I'd love to be doing. And those are things that, you know, right now, there's a new musical instrument I want to learn and I haven't gotten to it yet. I'm very, very disappointed. I haven't got there, but I'll get there. That's a 2026 plan. It's interesting because a lot of the things you mentioned and discussed, I've kind of gone through over the years and have been through many different cycles. Sleep has always been one that I sacrifice the most, although this past year I've tried to get back more into a semi more routine sleep cycle, especially with all this ice and snow. It's made it easy. Just hibernate. Just you can't go anywhere. And that is where we're going to pause this episode, but do not be afraid. Have no fear, because there's nothing to fear, but fear itself. But we will be back. We're going to continue our conversation and it continues to be a really good one. This was one of those that it was just, it was really fun asking a question and just letting him go. And there was just like mentally, I was trying to unpack things as we go. I was trying to just like take notes and do all the things that I could, because there's a lot of great information. And this is one of those I'm going to, I think I'm going to go back and listen to it probably a couple of times again, just because there are a lot of little things I was like, oh yeah, there's an idea. There's an idea. Here's something I should do. There's something I should do. Here's something I should think about in a lot of those. So hopefully you guys weren't overwhelmed. And if you are, get a bigger notebook because we do have a part two coming around next time. Thanks for hanging out with us though. Like I said, we will continue. We will get part two in our next episode and we are not done with our season. We have got plenty more ways for you to get that formal meaning as we get into our new year. As always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. This was sponsored by RB Consulting, your partner in building smarter, scalable tech. From startups to established teams, RB Consulting helps you turn tech chaos into clarity with proven roadmaps and hands on expertise. Visit RB-SNS.com to start your next step forward. Also sponsored by Envision QA. They help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most. Quality, reliability and support you can count on. Find out more at Envision QA. Thanks for tuning in to the Develop the Newer Podcast, where we're all about building better developers and better careers. I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback. So drop a note to info at Develop the Newer.com. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.